Eyes on You (3 page)

Back in my apartment, I eased off my shoes, tucked them carefully back in their box, and wiggled my feet into a pair of slippers. I’d eaten nothing at the party, and I was famished now. I smeared peanut butter on a few crackers and carried my snack to the small dining table in the living room, which was nestled beneath one of the lead-paned windows.

When I’d been married, my husband, Jake, and I had lived in an old loft downtown; my new place was about a quarter of the size, but I loved it. It was in a prewar building and had a small fireplace in the living room, but the closet and kitchen and bathroom had been modernized so that everything was crisp and clean.

I took a bite and began to replay the party in my mind. Though I’d known Bettina would go to town tonight, not only for my sake but also because of how it would reflect on
her
, I’d never expected anything so dazzling.

And yet, I thought glumly, the party seemed
tainted
now. Someone who’d been in that room despised me—for an imagined slight, or perhaps because I had what he or she wanted. I racked my brain, trying to remember whether anyone there had ever been hostile to me, but I drew a blank.

Finally, I stood up and tried to shake the thoughts away. I couldn’t let one ugly moment color the whole evening.

I brought my laptop to the table. For the next hour, I surfed online—every place from CNN to Gawker to the UK’s
Daily Mail
. Sunday night was generally worthless as far as news was concerned, yet occasionally, something crazy went down.
The Pulse
had a round-table format, derivative to a large extent of many shows on
MSNBC
, but we covered pop culture rather than politics—celebrities, buzzy trends, scandals, movies, and best-selling books. For tomorrow night we’d planned a segment on baby divorcées—stars who had married ridiculously young and then split a couple of years later. There was a chance that some celebrity marriage had blown up over the weekend, giving us an even fresher hook, but no such luck.

The segments might change anyway, as news broke tomorrow. That was part of the fun, what made daily TV so much more thrilling for me than print. I loved the scramble, the rush, the vibrations you could almost feel in the floor.

My cell phone rang, jerking me from my thoughts. I was surprised to see Carter’s name on the screen. We’d developed the habit of sometimes checking in at night and doing our own private postmortem of the show, but he’d never called on a Sunday.

“Hi there,” I said, answering.

“Great party,” he said.

“Glad you could come and see Bettina in all her glory.”

“I’m not interrupting a hot date, am I?”

“To tell you the truth, you are,” I said. “His name is Skippy. Skippy Extra Crunchy. We’ve asked a few crackers to drop in, too.”

Carter laughed. “Well, aren’t we Miss Kinky Pants?”

“So what’s up?” I asked. “Did you want to talk about tomorrow’s show?”

“Actually, I was following up on our conversation at the party. You said something strange had happened, and then your devoted fans interrupted.”

“Um—” I started to tell him, appreciative of his concern, but then thought better of it. Though I’d been ready to share at the party, it would have been a mistake. Carter didn’t need to hear that someone considered me an evil little bitch who deserved to get hers.

“You know, I don’t even remember now,” I said. “But I do have a question. What did you think of Mina Garvin being there?”

“I gotta say, that surprised me.”

“Do you know much about her personally?”

“Not a whole lot. Though a couple of people have told me that she’s as hateful in person as she is in print.”

Maybe Mina
was
the culprit.

“You shouldn’t give that chick another thought,” he added. “You’ve had the last laugh.”

“For
now
,” I said, chuckling.

“I have to tell you again, Robin. Your book is so damn smart. I love the section where you talk about how literal guys are, and how they assume, stupidly, that women are the same way. I think that was part of my problem with Jamie.”

“How so?” I asked. My inquiry was more personal than I generally played it with him, but he’d opened the door earlier, so it didn’t feel out of line.

“It seemed like there was something eating at her lately, but when I asked what it was, she kept saying everything was fine. Then one night she just exploded. It turned out she’d been working herself into a jealous snit.”

“Did she go through your texts, stuff like that?” I asked. That’s probably what I should have done with Jake, I thought. Then maybe I wouldn’t have been duped for so long.

“No . . . Okay, to be perfectly honest, she’s jealous of
you
.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. Here we go with the rumors again, I thought.

“She’d mentioned a few times that she didn’t like the way I looked at you on the air, and I assumed she was just teasing. But the night we had the confrontation, we were watching a recording of the show together, and she went bat-shit about you. She threw the damn remote at my head.” He laughed. “Do you think I need a restraining order?”

I laughed back. “Maybe I do, too. I know you said she wasn’t a rocket scientist, but doesn’t she get that it’s just
TV
?”

I nibbled a cracker, waiting for his response. But he didn’t say anything. Hold on, I thought. Was Carter suggesting that Jamie had a
reason
to be jealous? Clearly, he was being his flirty self. But this was further than he usually took things, and my mind went blank as I searched for the right quip to toss back.

“Well, look,” Carter said finally. “I’d better let you get back to Skippy.”

“Thanks for checking in. See you tomorrow.”

I tossed the phone on the table and stood in the middle of the room, still wondering. Maybe Carter had stopped talking at that moment to take a swig of a beer or watch a show he’d muted on television.

There was no denying that on the air, at least, we had crazy chemistry, and it had been there from our first audition together. My agent had been told they were looking for a Nick and Nora Charles–ish connection—irreverent, flirty, sarcastic at times without ever being mean—and so that was what I tried to deliver. Carter, who’d already been hired, made it easy. Every moment of the three auditions had seemed as fun and exhilarating as good improv. I wasn’t shocked when I learned I’d nailed it.

As the launch of the show approached, management decided, to my consternation, that I needed to rein it in a little. Though I was pissed, there was nothing I could do. I was the sidekick, after all, there first and foremost to introduce guests and move things along. The first weeks of shows were clunky and flat, and the reviews reflected that. I felt like I had a freaking muzzle on. And so one day, out of pure desperation, I let go with a zinger at Carter. He smiled, relishing it, and played right back. We were off and running, and no one tried to muzzle me again.

When the rumors had started about us, I’d laughed them off. Carter seemed like a player, the kind with a specific type of girl that he never deviated from—in his case, brunettes with big breasts. Jamie, whom I’d met when she dropped by after the show, had the kind of huge fake boobs that entered a room about two minutes before she did.

Oh, I’d let my imagination run free a few times, picturing what sex with Carter would be like. The up-front part would probably be fun—lots of dirty talk and clothes nearly ripped to ribbons. But in bed, he’d surely be bad-boy selfish, all about his own pleasure as he pounded away like a piston.

I set my plate in the dishwasher and then wrote a thank-you note to Bettina. It wasn’t hard to sound grateful—about the party, her support, her amazing toast.

What she hadn’t mentioned in her toast, when she was raving about my brilliant career, was the yawning year-and-a-half gap on my résumé—at least as far as TV was concerned. That whole time had been a nightmare for me. First Jake had dumped me for a woman he worked with. My only consolation, as I tried to deal with both his betrayal and his departure, was my work. I was the girl with the fun little show, whose picture adorned the side of bus shelters. Maybe I was clueless when it came to men, but
damn
, I was brilliant at getting my guests to open up.

Then that was gone, too. My agent was sure I’d be tapped quickly for another show, but the dual misery I felt sapped my energy, and I knew I stank at the auditions I did and the meetings I took. Four weeks later, I crashed my car while driving to Virginia for what was supposed to be a restorative trip with friends, and I spent the next weeks in bed with a broken ankle and pelvis. The requests for auditions all but dried up.

A few months later, my bones and bruises finally healed, I dragged myself out of bed. By now the only offers coming in were for me to star in infomercials. I would never be
that
desperate. I fought off my inertia long enough to write a blog for Bettina’s website. It was about the female need to please. More blogs followed, and one in particular hit a nerve, sending a book editor in pursuit. I scored an advance, not huge but nice, better than I’d imagined, and I wrote the whole thing in six months, like a maniac.

Around the same time, Bettina signed me to consult for her site and help plan where it needed to go next with celebrity coverage. The calls to my agent picked up, and then, thanks to Ann, I got a lead about subbing for a show on the network. Next came the chance to audition for
The Pulse.

As I slid the note into an envelope, my eye fell on my evening bag, which I’d dropped on the table when I returned home. I’d never thought to check if anything
else
had been left in there, something I hadn’t detected earlier. I dumped the contents on the table—lipstick, blush, comb, credit card, a couple of dollar bills. Nothing else.

Then I noticed the stain. Some of the ink from the Sharpie had managed to bleed onto the pale blue lining, making a black amoeba-like mark. The sight of it disgusted me.

Still holding the bag, I stood up and walked to the entryway of my apartment and swung open the front door. There was no one in the corridor. I strode halfway down the hall to the small room for trash disposal. Inside, on one of the walls, a metal door opened to the chute that led to the trash compactor. I opened the door and hurled the bag down the chute. I could hear the diminishing sound of the bag bouncing against the metal sides.

I
hated
things with stains on them. They made me think of my stepmother. So anything with a stain had to be destroyed.

I was at work before nine the next day. It was earlier than usual, but I had a conference call at ten with the publisher’s PR team, and I wanted time to review my checklist first.

Due to a space shortage, my office wasn’t off the newsroom, like Carter’s. It was down a whole other corridor, not far from the makeup room. It would have been better, work-wise, to be near the white-hot center, where all the producers sat, and there’d been talk of moving me down there when they could carve out the space. But I liked the privacy that my office afforded me.

When the call came in, I could tell that everyone was totally jazzed about the party. I’d already seen a few items in the press, but they described others, all favorable. I thanked them for their efforts. I was pretty sure they couldn’t detect the dull hangover of anxiety I had from the hate note left in my purse.

Next we reviewed the press plans for the week to come. There would be minimal TV appearances because of my own show, but tons of online coverage, about two dozen radio interviews, and a boatload of tweets and retweets. During the past month, I’d tied myself to my desk at home on weekends and ground out a bunch of guest blogs—touching on points in the book—and they’d be gradually released and posted over the coming days.

“It’s clear what’s starting to resonate most,” said one of the team. “It’s the part about women secretly not feeling that they deserve what they have. And the chapter on being ashamed about something you once did. That’s hitting a nerve.”

“Lots of places need photos,” the junior publicist said. I could tell who she was because she made every sentence shoot up at the end. “Are you okay with us sending outtakes from the jacket photo shoot?”

“Of course,” I said. I loved the shot of me in the red dress.

“Oh, by the way, I nearly forgot the best news of all,” my main publicist, Claire, announced. “The book’s ranking high on online retail sites. That’s a very good sign.”

“We can probably thank my coanchor for that,” I said. “He’s been nicely pimping the book on the show.”

“True,” Claire said. “But when I’ve been pitching, it’s been pretty clear that you’ve built your own following. And people really love the show.”

The convergence of the book and the show had been pure luck, but it was clearly going to drive up sales. And I would gladly take them any way I could get them.

My assistant, Keiki, was off that day, dealing with a labradoodle in surgery, so I had the office to myself. I grabbed a coffee in the kitchenette down the hall and then jumped online. I reviewed the tweets the show had generated last night and skimmed through various news sites, looking for emerging stories as well as tidbits that Carter and I could bat around in the up-front chat section. I saved a half hour of my morning to put the finishing touches on a ratings analysis I’d done. Our executive producer, Tom Golden, hadn’t asked for it, but I knew he’d find interesting what I’d discovered. I wanted to read it over in hard copy before I turned it over to him.

When I briefly checked email, I noticed that someone—I couldn’t tell who from the address—had nicely emailed a half-dozen photos of me from the party, probably taken with a phone. I was beaming in every shot.

That’s
the way I’d remember last night, I told myself, and I’d just purge the note from my memory.

At noon I headed to the newsroom. There were about twenty desks bunched there, occupied by producers, writers, and bookers. Our set, which was also used by several other shows with modifications, flowed directly from the newsroom. It was a futuristic-looking space that made me think of the bay of a Hollywood movie spaceship, hurtling toward another galaxy. I felt a rush every time I stepped on it.